jazzeum
Four Star General
- Joined
- Apr 23, 2005
- Messages
- 38,439
I don't how many of you read Military History Quarterly (which I enjoy and recommend) but in the latest issue Professor Gary Gallagher has a very brief article on five overrated officers in the American Civil War, as follows:
1. Shelby Foote said Beford Forrest stood alongside Abraham Lincoln as one of the war's "two authentic geniuses." To Gallagher this defines hyperbole. "Forrest was an excellent cavalry officer who vexed Union forces in the Western Theater but he lacked the administrative skills, temperament, and intellect to lead an army. Nothing in his record suggests he could have succeeded in operational or strategic planning and execution." [In my view to compare him to Lincoln is absurd]
2. John Reynolds exemplifies the phenomenon of reputations inflated by death in dramatic circumstances (killed on the morning of July 1, 1863, as he rode toward the fighting along McPherson's Ridge, elevated him to the status of martyred hero), which and sparked untold speculation about what might have been.
3. Joseph Johnston has been compared to Fabius Maximus and has been lauded as having an undertanding that masterful retreats and defensive thinking best suited the Confederacy's needs. However, Gallagher believes his "retreats in Virginia and Georgia demoralized the South, while his logistical blundering after First Bull Run, clumsy offensive on the Peninsula in May 1862, and pathological concern with rank and privilege all harmed the cause."
4. Gallagher says that few figures have inspired more romantic adulation than John Singleton Mosby, whose battalion of partisan rangers operated in the Shenandoah Valley and elsewhere in northern Virginia. "Yet Mosby's attacks on supply trains and other activities, though annoying to Union commanders, did nothing to shape the larger outcome of the war in Virginia."
5. Gallagher is less ****ing in speaking about Joshua Chamberlain, one of many Union colonels who led their units with distinction at Gettysburg. He remained largely forgotten until The Killer Angels and Ken Burns's documentary brought him back into focus. "By the mid-1990s, his reputation outshone that of all Union officers except Ulysses S. Grant and perhaps William Tecumseh Sherman. The "Hero of Little Round Top," as he came to be known, surely deserves to be remembered—but only as one among many."
1. Shelby Foote said Beford Forrest stood alongside Abraham Lincoln as one of the war's "two authentic geniuses." To Gallagher this defines hyperbole. "Forrest was an excellent cavalry officer who vexed Union forces in the Western Theater but he lacked the administrative skills, temperament, and intellect to lead an army. Nothing in his record suggests he could have succeeded in operational or strategic planning and execution." [In my view to compare him to Lincoln is absurd]
2. John Reynolds exemplifies the phenomenon of reputations inflated by death in dramatic circumstances (killed on the morning of July 1, 1863, as he rode toward the fighting along McPherson's Ridge, elevated him to the status of martyred hero), which and sparked untold speculation about what might have been.
3. Joseph Johnston has been compared to Fabius Maximus and has been lauded as having an undertanding that masterful retreats and defensive thinking best suited the Confederacy's needs. However, Gallagher believes his "retreats in Virginia and Georgia demoralized the South, while his logistical blundering after First Bull Run, clumsy offensive on the Peninsula in May 1862, and pathological concern with rank and privilege all harmed the cause."
4. Gallagher says that few figures have inspired more romantic adulation than John Singleton Mosby, whose battalion of partisan rangers operated in the Shenandoah Valley and elsewhere in northern Virginia. "Yet Mosby's attacks on supply trains and other activities, though annoying to Union commanders, did nothing to shape the larger outcome of the war in Virginia."
5. Gallagher is less ****ing in speaking about Joshua Chamberlain, one of many Union colonels who led their units with distinction at Gettysburg. He remained largely forgotten until The Killer Angels and Ken Burns's documentary brought him back into focus. "By the mid-1990s, his reputation outshone that of all Union officers except Ulysses S. Grant and perhaps William Tecumseh Sherman. The "Hero of Little Round Top," as he came to be known, surely deserves to be remembered—but only as one among many."
